Hello Shadi,
[trimming the lists in Cc - I think it's best to followup only in one
validator list, as I had originally requested]
Thanks for your thoughts and answers.
On Mar 5, 2007, at 21:07 , Shadi Abou-Zahra wrote:
> Indeed, the validators are one of our primary use case. We would be
> very interested in having the W3C validators being reference
> implementations for EARL when we get to CR stage.
You're not saying "reference implementation" in the sense of [1], are
you?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_implementation
Because that would be impossible. The validators can't serve that
purpose. They can, however, be considered as some of the
implementations for software producing earl, obviously.
> You may be interested in our "Pointer Methods in RDF" document. It
> is a *very* early draft and still quite rough but it shows the
> basic principle of pointers to point into the test subject from the
> result (for example to point to an element that caused the
> validation error):
> - <http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/Pointers/WD-Pointers-20070222>
Yes, this looks interesting indeed.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/Pointers/WD-Pointers-20070222#use-cases
looks like it covers most of what would be needed.
pointer:linecharlength is useful, so is pointer:selector. Would it
perhaps be possible to have a property for "any kind of context", or
would that be too vague and hard to use?
> This really depends on the context of the *test case*. For example,
> if you are checking that the CSS document has the correct syntax,
> then the HTML document is not part of the test. If however you are
> testing an HTML page *together* with a CSS page (for example to
> test attribute override or such), then you could indeed use the
> technique above (which is also highlighted by example 7 in the
> document you reference above).
I think I understand. It makes sense and it is in a way stricter than
what the CSS validator is usually doing. For instance, if you give
the CSS validator an HTML page to analyse, it will report conformance
issues with the whole, the HTML document and the CSS stylesheets it
links to, whereas strictly speaking, if the HTML document does not
have any style element or attr, it is irrelevant to CSS conformance.
After that, the matter is presenting results to the user.
>> * earl:sourceCopy could be interesting for "direct input",
>> although I'm unsure whether it would be useful to copy massive
>> chunks of text around like that. Could we just use a hash as
>> earl:subject? We need to find ways to identify the subject for
>> direct input and file upload, in any case.
>
> The earl:Content class and its properties has been revised in the
> current version of the document, we would welcome feedback on it.
I look at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/EARL10/WD-EARL10-
Schema-20070226#content and I think it fits my needs. Notably, if I
want to make an assertion about something that is not online and has
no inherent URI, I suppose I can do something like
<earl:Assertion rdf:about="#assertion">
<earl:subject rdf:resource="#subject"/>
</earl:Assertion>
<earl:Content rdf:about="#subject">
<earl:sourceCopy rdf:parseType="Literal" xml:lang="en">
...
</earl:sourceCopy>
<earl:context rdf:resource="#httpRequest"/>
</earl:Content>
or even, if I don't need to pass a copy of the content and HTTP
context (thanks for that! it will be useful to us I'm sure) the
following would be ok too.
<earl:Assertion rdf:about="#assertion">
<earl:subject rdf:resource="urn:md5:..."/>
</earl:Assertion>
Is that correct?
> We would be very interested in hearing about your experience with
> EARL, and if you spot any issues. Especially when we go for Last
> Call later this month, your review comments would be very important
> to us. I'll ping the groups here once we are so far...
I think the next step, as far as the validators are concerned, is to
take the existing EARL outputs [2] [3] and update them to use the
latest schema, see how much we can put in, what's relevant to
validators and what is not.
[2] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/validator/share/templates/en_US/
earl_n3.tmpl
[3] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/validator/share/templates/en_US/
earl_xml.tmpl
Anyone on the mailing-list interested in taking this on? This could
be an interesting little project, and would not involve coding, only
understanding the templating syntax, which is simple.
--
olivier